


The Book of Love

by agent_florida



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Fluff, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-15
Updated: 2010-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-23 17:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/agent_florida
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simmons’ sister is getting married! So, naturally, she asks her brother’s ‘cute friend’ to play a song on the guitar for her entrance. And, naturally, Simmons himself is a nervous wreck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Book of Love

“Dude, just tell me if I look okay. I don’t want Gloria to kill me or anything.”  
  
In fact, if Simmons could admit it to himself, Grif looked even more dashing than usual. Gloria had insisted on a casual dress code for her wedding, but Rich was sure that Dex looked more handsome in his black button-down and slacks than he himself did. “Come here, your tie’s crooked.” It was a lie, but it got Grif to stand closer to him, and he got to touch him in the middle of the crowded Catholic church without anyone giving him a second glance, pretending to adjust the knot in his orange tie.  
  
“I bet you anything it’s not,” Dex grumbled. “You, though…” And he dragged a finger across Rich’s neck for the briefest of moments before his own fingers were fiddling with his maroon tie. Rich jumped under his touch, and Dex chuckled good-naturedly. “You don’t have to be so nervous.”  
  
“I’m not nervous!” But his voice gave him away; it cracked as soon as he hit a two-syllable word.  
  
“Just calm down. I’m sure you’ll do all right with the reading.” Dex leaned down to grab his guitar case. “You going to be able to breathe?”  
  
Rich just looked at him. He wanted to beg his boyfriend to stay with him, to hold his hand to keep him calm, but he knew that just touching here was a risk unto itself. “Yeah,” he said quickly, grasping onto his arm quickly in lieu of giving him a hug. “Yeah, I’ll be all right. Just… just don’t fuck it up.”  
  
“Dude, relax. I’ll do the song, you’ll do the reading, and in no time we’ll be saying mazel tov and heading for the open bar.” Dex’s smile was wicked. “Save me a seat, yeah?” And he was heading for the chapel before Rich could get a word in edgewise.  
  
He just smiled and sighed. For his part, he was glad Dex was playing along with all of this. Gloria had asked him a few weeks ago if ‘that cute friend of yours who plays guitar’ could play a song to usher her into the chapel, and Dex had gladly stepped up to the challenge.  
  
Rich suspected he had an ulterior motive. Dex had no love for religion or fancy parties; knowing him, he really  _was_  here just for the alcohol. And to make Rich’s parents nervous if he got too up-front about his advances while they were still at the reception. And also possibly to get him drunk and see if they couldn’t do what they had been talking about for weeks, to see if he could get Rich to push that envelope just a bit farther.  
  
But as Rich stepped into the chapel, he reminded himself that it wasn’t about him and Dex today. It was about God, and it was about Gloria, and it was about St. Valentine whose day it was, and it was a gigantic reminder that his year-long relationship with another boy was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was hard to remember that it was so against his principles, though, as he watched Dex’s fingertips moving between the frets on the neck of his guitar, thinking of the other glorious things those fingers could do and the beautiful music they could make.  
  
For his part, Dex was right. The ceremony was going a lot faster than Rich had expected - maybe because he had been to so many cousins’ weddings over the years, maybe because he was waiting for Dex to start playing the song he had been practicing for Gloria’s entrance. Dex hadn’t allowed him to hear it before the ceremony, hadn’t even told him what it was going to be, and so when the strings of the guitar twanged and his voice sang out clearly, Rich was transfixed.  
  
“The book of love is long and boring – no one can lift the damn thing. It’s full of charts and facts and figures and instructions for dancing...” And Rich’s heart was filled with a sudden blinding clarity. Even if Dex hadn’t written this song, it was clearly as much for the two of them as it was about his sister and her groom. Facts and figures… all of those days with those calculus tutorials, Rich bribing Dex with kisses and touches so he would sit still and finish the math, Rich calculating how long something like their relationship was supposed to last, Dex surprising him every day as they beat the odds. Instructions for dancing… the night of the winter formal last year, the sudden heat of kisses on his face, on his mouth, hands inside his jacket, touching the skin of his back.  
  
“And I, I love it when you read me things. And you, you can read me anything.” All those afternoons with Dex’s head on his lap…  
  
 _“You’re completely capable of reading,” he complained, holding their book of Enlightenment poetry closer to his face. “Why do I have to read it to you?”  
  
“I…” Dex actually looked embarrassed. “I like the words better when they’re coming out of your mouth. You’re the only person I know of who can make fleas sound sexy.”  
  
“For God’s sake, Dex, it_ is  _a metaphor for sex,” Rich said, but he couldn’t keep the smile out of his voice as he began to read Donne aloud._  
  
“The book of love has music in it; in fact, that’s where music comes from. Some of it’s just transcendental – most of it is just really dumb.” And Dex’s eyes, which had been trained on his hand that was plucking the strings, came up to find Rich’s in the audience; if Rich had still entertained any doubts as to whether this was about him, they had been replaced with butterflies in his stomach and a heaviness in his heart. If anyone found out that he was looking at him – that Dex was looking at him, with those eyes, for that reason…  
  
“And I, I love it when you sing to me. And you, you can sing me anything.” That line had to be a joke, and it was, because Dex smiled that secret smile, the one that meant it was something not meant to be understood by anyone else.  
  
 _They had been playing Rock Band for hours, switching off between guitar parts. Of course Rich didn’t have any finger dexterity, so he usually stayed on the bass, but he could flail around enough on the drums to get the job done while Dex wailed on the riffs. Show-off, Rich grumbled to himself as he hit almost every note on the hardest mode._  
  
Once they finished their twentieth song, though, Dex looked up at him through his fringe with a devilish glint in his eye. “Come on, grab the mic and I’ll get on the drums.”  
  
Oh, no. This was what Rich had been dreading. “I can’t sing!” he complained, his voice cracking in the middle of the sentence.  
  
“And I can’t drum. I just want to hear you sing.” When Rich couldn’t say anything through a choked-up throat, he reached over to hold his hand. “Come on. I won’t judge you.”  
  
“Yes, you will,” Rich grumbled, but it was too late; the song was already starting. It was one they both knew, which would make it even more awkward when Rich finally opened his mouth to at least attempt to say the words. “When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye. You’re just like an angel, your skin makes me cry… I can’t do this, Dex.”  
  
“Come on, it’s not like we’re going to…” And then the screen crashed, flashing up a red screen before diverting back to the main menu. “… fail the song or anything,” he finished lamely.  
  
Then, to Rich’s horror, his boyfriend started laughing. He felt his face heat up, knowing that he was probably blushing hard enough to melt through steel. “I told you – it’s not funny…”  
  
“No, it’s not that… I love you, you know that?”  
  
And then Rich was blushing for a totally different reason when Dex grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him down to kiss him.  
  
Meanwhile, Dex’s song was continuing around him, and the words were making Rich blush. “The book of love is long and boring, and written very long ago. It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes, and things we’re all too young to know.” Gloria passed his side, but Rich was too entranced with the song to look at her in her wedding finery. “And I, I love it when you give me things. And you, you should give me wedding rings.”  
  
Dex was still staring at him. He was still staring, damn it, and thankfully the people sat down around him as he lost his knees. Was this… was this performance of the song his Valentine’s Day gift? Was Dex trying to tell him something? Had Gloria picked the song, or had it been Dex’s choice all along? His head was swimming, but in moments Dex had left his place in front of the altar and was sneaking in to sit next to him. “Did you like it?” he whispered.  
  
“Shut up,” Rich whispered back, his eyes trained on his sister and her groom, trying not to give Dex any more attention than he had already received from him.  
  
Dex’s hand nudged up against his thigh as the priest began his officiating speech. “Two lives, two hearts, joined together in friendship, united by love…” “Did you at least think I did a good job?” Dex whispered over it.  
  
When Rich looked down, Dex’s hand was waiting for his, lying palm-up between them in the pew. He carefully kept his hand in his own lap, clutching his program and the slip of paper he had written his reading on. “We’re not talking about this right now.”  
  
“Fine,” Dex said simply. It was more crushing than anything else he could have said; Rich knew he got snippy and short when he was angry, and since he couldn’t even marshal a full sentence, something was really wrong.  
  
And so the two of them sat, uncomfortably silent, trying not to touch one another, until Rich was called forward to do his reading. When he rose, his legs were shaky, and his palms were sweating. He was nervous, and he looked over his shoulder at Dex. His face looked almost nervous for him, and knowing that the reassuring smile had left his face unnerved Rich more than anything else.  
  
He could barely feel time move as he read the words of the Pablo Neruda poem his sister had picked. “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,” he began, trying hard not to lisp, “or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”  
  
He tried hard not to look at Dex; he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was unnerved, that he needed a familiar face in the crowd to attach to. But he gave in eventually, and Dex’s eyes were waiting for him to fall into. This was what his own face must have looked like when he was enraptured with the song; full of love, enthralled with the performance of someone he loved, exalting in the feeling of performance.  
  
But towards the end of the poem, his slight lisp got the better of him, and not even Dex’s expression could keep him from feeling terrible that he was messing up the wedding. God, first he had brought his boyfriend into a Catholic church, and now they were practically kissing each other in public by performing bad love poetry for one another. When he finally finished the poem, he moved away from his spot near the altar as fast as he could, knowing Dex’s eyes would be following him as he skipped his seat and decided instead to leave the chapel.  
  
He needed air. He needed a breath of fresh, cold February air to set himself straight, and so he rushed through the rest of his church to get to the parking lot. He didn’t want to be inside the chapel any more, especially not with Dex next to him; it made him feel like the world was going to spontaneously combust around him. Today, on Valentine’s Day, almost a year since he and Dex had started dating, it wasn’t just bad enough that he was both gay and Catholic. No, it was that he was gay and Catholic and in love and could never be married like this and could never give Dex all that he wanted to and could never make any parts of his life fit together in any meaningful way.  
  
He sat down on a bench, the cold of the stone evident through the thin cloth of his slacks, and let his head fall down to rest in his hands. He couldn’t do this any more. He had to tell Dex, had to tell him today, had to tell him as soon as he could. His boyfriend didn’t deserve to have him, not if he was going to be this neurotic, not if he was going to be this difficult.  
  
Adding to everything that was making the day horrible were the college acceptance letters he knew were waiting for him in his room. He had applied as early as he could to every school he could think of, and he had received a few scholarship offers. But Dex had never been into school, had told him that his plan was to join the military after graduation, and Rich knew the inevitable had to happen. So why not end it now? It would give him a few months to get over it before a long, glorious summer full of math camp and cross country practice and college orientations.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Rich jumped at the soft word, even though he knew that when he lifted his head out of his hands, it would be Dex standing there. “Hey,” he mumbled through his hands.  
  
He heard his boyfriend sit down next to him, and then there was a warm arm around his shoulders and a hand on his knee. “You doing all right?”  
  
No, he wanted to say. No, no, I’m not doing all right, I can’t do this any more, I love you too much for this to be healthy for me. “Yeah,” he forced himself to say. “I’m fine.”  
  
“You don’t look fine.” Rich deliberately didn’t say anything, and sure enough, soon Dex was invading his personal space even more, his chin on his shoulder and his cold nose poking into his ear. “I didn’t give you your present yet.”  
  
“I thought you gave it to me in there.” They usually didn’t buy gifts for one another, not even for their first anniversary last week; it brought too much attention to their relationship. Besides, if there was one thing Rich had learned about Dex, it was that he would take care of his sister before anything else, and it was hard to hold that against him.  
  
“Nah. I mean, it’s just something little.” He took his hand off of Rich’s knee, and Rich took his hands away from his face to see his boyfriend holding something small and shiny between his thumb and forefinger.  
  
Now Rich was not only cold, but lightheaded. “Dex, is – is that a ring?”  
  
“Don’t freak out on me. I just… saw it and wanted you to wear it.”  
  
Rich reached out with a trembling hand and took the cold metal from between Dex’s fingers. “How did you afford this?”  
  
“It was kinda cheap, but as long as you don’t, you know, do anything too violent, it shouldn’t break or anything.” Rich just stared at it, watching the bleak February sun reflect from the surface. “You’re freaking out on me, aren’t you?”  
  
“What am I supposed to do with this?”  
  
“Wear it, stupid.” Dex grabbed the ring from his right hand and forced it onto his ring finger; it was a little too loose, but Rich let his boyfriend keep holding his hand. “There. Look, it looks classy on you.”  
  
“But what is this supposed to mean?” Rich complained.  
  
“That I want you to have it. God, if I had known that you weren’t going to like it, I wouldn’t have bothered.”  
  
“Dex…” He sighed; finding the right words around his boyfriend was always hard, but knowing that they were important made his task even harder. “When people in my family get rings, they get married to whoever gave them the ring.”  
  
“I still don’t see what the problem is.”  
  
“Dexter Grif, we can’t get married. Not by these rules. I’m Catholic, Dex, when is this going to get through to you?” He was shaking, and he attributed it to the cold even though Dex was still holding him.  
  
“Screw the rules,” Dex mumbled as he held Rich closer. He kissed him first on the cheek, then on the corner of his mouth, and when he finally kissed him head-on Rich thought he had melted into the pavement for a few seconds. “And screw your God. I just want you to be happy. Is that so hard?”  
  
And Rich felt himself unconsciously mirroring the reassuring smile on Dex’s face before he let his boyfriend kiss him again. “I love you,” he mumbled between kisses, hating himself for feeling that way, hating himself for saying those words and sharing this embrace so close to his church.  
  
After a few moments, their foreheads were pressed together, Rich’s breaths hanging heavy and foglike in the winter air. “Come on,” Dex said, squeezing Rich’s hand and pinching his new ring against his fingers. “We need to go back inside, or your sister might kill both of us.”  
  
“Right.” Once again, Rich felt like he had his head screwed on completely backwards. Was this what love was supposed to feel like? Or was he just doing the wrong thing? “Wedding. Gloria.”  
  
“Alcohol.” Dex stood, dragging him along as they both made their way back into the church.  
  
“Is that all you care about?” Rich wasn’t going to touch any of it. He already felt drunk; vulnerable, dizzy, overwhelmed.  
  
“I care about you,” he said in a sing-song voice. “And besides, how else am I going to get what I want unless you’re a little drunk?”  
  
Rich flushed. “That’s not fair. That’s – that’s cheating. And I already said no.”  
  
“Fine, then.” And then Rich felt Dex’s gaze do a dial-up, and he knew that his boyfriend was undressing him with his eyes; his face was probably tomato-red by now. “I’ll just have to seduce you the old-fashioned way.”  
  
And Dex wandered back into the service, leaving a blushing, imaginative Rich to wonder just what was in store for him later and just why he was going to agree to do it.


End file.
